Welcome to the blog for Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009: Creating the future.* I’m Jon Pincus, program committee member and vice-chair for online visibility. This blog, along with our Wetpaint wiki and social network presence, is an attempt to get the CFP community to participate more deeply in the future that’s being created — and to reach out to online communities that we haven’t engaged with in the past.
One of the things we’d like to do is turn this blog into a hub of lively discussion about “CFP topics”:
CFP is the leading policy conference exploring the impact of the Internet, computers and communications technologies on society. It will be taking place in June 2009, just months into a brand new U.S. administration — an exciting moment in history, as we look into the future and ask, “Where do we go from here?” For more than a decade, CFP has anticipated policy trends and issues and has shaped the public debate on the future of privacy and freedom in an ever more technology-filled world. CFP focuses on topics such as freedom of speech, privacy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, telecommunications, electronic democracy, digital rights and responsibilities, and the future of technologies and their implications.
There aren’t a lot of places that focus primarily on these topics — and at least in the US, none (as far as I know) with CFP’s unique mix of legal, policy, technology, activist, corporate, governmental, and international perspectives. So it’s a real opportunity for CFP to establish an online presence that allows a virtual version of the in-person contact that’s so valuable at the conference itself [for those who can afford to go there and take the time off work].
To do that, we’ll need bloggers — and moderators, because the discussion’s likely going to get intense. As well as inviting the program committee and conference speakers (once they’re selected) to participated, we’d also like to invite ideas and solicit volunteers from the community.
If you’re interested in blogging about something, please leave a comment below describing the idea in a couple of sentences, along with a bit about yourself. You can use links to point people to more additional information. Once we know how many people are interested, we’ll get things going.
And whether or not you blog, if you’d like to volunteer as a moderator, by all means do! There are a bunch of resources on dealing with hate speech, flaming, and trolls from a workshop session we did last year, and we’ll get some guidlines posted fairly soon.
Thanks much … and whether or not you’re signing up to help yet, stay tuned. With luck, it’ll be informative, interesting and fun. What more can you ask for?
jon
PS: This year’s Computers Freedom and Privacy conference will be in Washington, DC, June 1-4, 2009. Please join us in-person!
* Thanks to CFP tech wizard Lenny Foner for setting up what appears to be the first blog ever hosted on cfp.org — last year’s http://cfp08.blogspot.com/ was hosted by Google.
